Scheduled Transaction Templates

[Josh Sled]

On Sun, Dec 16, 2001 at 01:11:42PM -0500, Tim Wunder wrote:

| 1. The variables don't seem to like being blank, or 0. If I have blank 
| variables, the SX will not complete. If I change then to 0.01, the SX will 
| complete. It seems logical to me that blank variables would be treated as 0 
| and 0 value variables should be acceptable. Maybe I'm missing something...

Yes ... you're correct.  This is the way it should work; I've added these
to the TODO and bugs list.

| 2. I can't seem to use ordinary math functions within the variables (+/-). 
| line items to add together. It wold certainly be convenient to just enter the 
| line ites separated by '+' and have the variable get calculated. Unless, 
| again, I'm missing something...

That should work fine.  There shouldn't be anything wacky about the
expression, there ... it doesn't need an '=' at the front or anything.
But it could be the case that the variable expression it doesn't get
re-eval'd as an expression, but I was pretty sure it did.  I'll investigate.

| 3. If I press <Tab>, the cursor should go to the next variable entry block, 
| but it doesn't. I've gotta hit tab twice.

Yeah... there's all sorts of tab-ordering problems in all the various SX
parts... I wanted to wait until the UI stabalized until fixing those.

| 4. Where variables get most cumbersome is when entering a credit card SX. 
| I've tried to list all potential accounts that my Credit Card payment is 
| going to need to update. But, invariably, something special will come up. 

I'm confused about your example... if the CC payment is scheduled, why
does it not come from one place [where you usuallly pay the CC from]?
And if it does change, then ... well ... you'll just have to manually
deal with that ea. month/period, I guess.

| It 
| sure would be nice to have a screen where I can finalize the transaction, add 
| accounts/amounts prior to posting it. As it stands now, that's done from 
| within the Checking account, which I suppose is OK. But it sure would be 
| nicer if it could be done from within the SX dialog.

Yes; once you bind the variables, it will [eventually] re-display the
transactions for you to finalize.  I haven't done this yet because I want
to finish some other UI changes which will make it easier to do that,
but haven't gotten around to it, yet [see below].

| 5. I'd like to be able to post an SX even if it's outside the time frame 
| assigned to it. Say an SX is scheduled to run 7 days prior to a particular 
| date. I'd like to be able to run it 8, or 10 days prior without bringing up 
| the SX dialog and editing it.

For this, I'd say set it to 10 [max] days and subsequently ignore it
until it's time to go... the annoying thing about doing that is that it
will keep bringing up the since-last-run druid every time you run GnuCash
... so maybe it'd be nice to be able to go to the SX list and just say
'create this right now'...

| BTW, I've finally updated from CVS, so I'm current. Doesn't look like jsled's 
| gotten to do much with SXs, though. I guess he's fairly busy with other 
| things. 

No, I really haven't... and yes, I've been very busy with work and real
life... but I hope to return to this stuff w/in the next week or so...

| I wish I could lend a hand with coding, but I'm not much of a 
[deletia]
| I might be able to make a little sense out of it. Possibly even contribute 

The main files are in the engine [src/engine/SchedXaction.[hc] and
src/engine/FreqSpec.[hc]], though those haven't changed much.  Most of
it's actually in the UI, which is src/gnome/dialog-scheduledxaction.[hc]
and src/gnome/dialog-sxsincelast.[hc]... 

There's probably some things [like tab-order] which aren't necessarily
coding-related [I think it can all be specified from w/in glade]
which you could deal with ... and would be tre-useful.  Check out the
src/doc/TODO-schedxactions for an idea of what's to be done...

| Anyway... I'll continue to work with it and post any suggestions or problems 
| I might have.

Excellent!

...jsled